cmdxray / commands

Shell commands, explained

Plain-English breakdowns of 51 common commands — every flag, real examples, token by token. Or paste your own command into the offline explainer.

aptinstall and manage Debian/Ubuntu packagesawkpattern-scanning and text-processing languageawscommand-line interface for Amazon Web Servicescatconcatenate files and print themchmodchange file mode (permission) bitschownchange file owner and groupcpcopy files or directoriescrontabinstall, view, or edit a user's scheduled (cron) jobscurltransfer data to or from a URLcutextract selected columns from each lineddcopy and convert data block by blockdfreport free space on mounted filesystemsdockerbuild, run and manage containersduestimate file and directory disk usageffmpegrecord, convert and stream audio and videofindwalk a directory tree looking for filesgitthe distributed version control systemgrepsearch input for lines matching a patternheadprint the first part of filesipshow / manipulate routing, network devices, interfaces and tunnelsjournalctlquery and display logs from the systemd journaljqcommand-line JSON processor (apply a filter to JSON input)killsend a signal to a processkubectlcontrol a Kubernetes clusterlnmake links between fileslslist directory contentslsoflist open files (and the processes that hold them open)makebuild targets according to a Makefilemkdircreate directoriesmvmove or rename files and directoriesncopen, listen on, or script raw TCP/UDP connections (netcat)netstatshow network connections, routing tables, and interface statsnpmthe Node.js package manageropensslOpenSSL — command-line cryptography and TLS toolkitpingtest reachability of a host on the networkpsreport a snapshot of running processesrmremove files or directoriesrsyncefficiently sync files, copying only what changedscpcopy files between hosts over SSHsedstream editor — transform text line by linesortsort lines of textssinspect sockets (a faster, modern replacement for netstat)sshlog in to or run a command on a remote machinesystemctlcontrol the systemd init system and its servicestailprint the last part of filestararchive utility — bundle files into (or extract them from) a .tartrtranslate or delete charactersunzipextract files from a ZIP archivewccount lines, words and byteswgetdownload files from the web over HTTP/FTPxargsbuild and run command lines from standard input

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